9.27.2010

walking with giants, visiting the dead











In 1967, Oscar Neimeyer, Brazillian Modernist Architect Extraordinaire, began designing an International Fair site in Tripoli. Channeling both his strongly Corbusian background and subtle Arab influences, his fairground was an exploration in material, space, and form. It is High Modernism. In 1975 construction stopped mid-way through completion; the civil war had started, and no one came back to finish the job.

But the pavilions remain, cracking and crumbling in a well-tended garden. It is a an architectural graveyard; the rotting corpses of great characters set among flowers and serene, expansive, unbelievably eerie parkland.


More photos here (really worth it, I promise): Tripoli

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